Thankful 1

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Another video of me in my living room pounding away at my old piano, singing one of the 26 songs from my book.

We live in a seemingly impossible universe - the fine structure constants are tuned to within surprisingly narrow margins - just a little less gravity and it all would have flown apart into nothingness from the big bang, a little too much gravity and it would all have collapsed back in upon itself by now. How did we get so lucky? That's the conundrum. Some people point to a simple version of the Anthropic Principle which says the reason we're asking how we ended up in this unique universe that supports life as we know it is because if the universe didn't support life as we know it, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

For me, the version of the Anthropic Priniciple which says all those other universes do actually exist rings much truer. As the current issue of Scientific American discusses, modern science is starting to explore some of the other forms and chemical processes that "life as we don't know it" could be able to exist in other parts of our own universe... and some even more fantastical constructions of energy and matter that become interested in "what happens next" might well flourish in other completely separate different-initial-conditions-universes from our own, out there in other parts of the multiverse.

Whether you believe in a Creator-God that put together this intricate puzzle, or whether you believe in a Dawkins-style "blind watchmaker" of chance and selection which got us to where we are now, there's nothing wrong with feeling some wonder and some humility at how extraordinary it all really is. And saying "thank you" for something as wonderful as all this, regardless of your belief system, is just good manners!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

See No Future

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

Here I am singing one of the 26 songs that are found in the back pages of my book, all of which are related to the concepts from Imagining the Tenth Dimension in various ways. As I've discussed before in this blog, I think it's easy to define "life" as being any process that appears to be interested in what happens next. This song is about the negative patterns any of us can find ourselves trapped within. But this is also the message of hope from the timeless multiverse that we're imagining here: if all possible timelines do really exist, that information may not be so useful to someone who is happy with how their life is going. For a person who is trapped in repetitive loops of depression or addiction, some might find some strength in the knowledge that modern physics suggests the version of our universe actually exists where that person finds their way out. And that would be a good thing: when you see no future, that is a very dark place to be.

SEE NO FUTURE
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

You see no future on the road that you’ve been travelin
You see no reason to continue any more
Still you keep on keepin on
Cause it’s the way you’ve always gone
Won’t you tell me what the hell you do it for

Now if there’s one thing I can say – it’s you’re consistent
And you’re persistent to a fault, sure, some’d say
Are you stubborn or just dumb?
Why don’t you try to find someone
Who will help to turn you round the other way
When you see no future

No tomorrows
Just todays
Is that the way you wanna stay?
No wishes
No dreams
Can’t you find another way?

I wish some happiness could join you on your journey
I hope that fortune finally finds you on your way
But tell me how will you ever win
When that big wheel that you’re in
Has you runnin the same circle every day
You see no future

No tomorrows....

You see no future on the road that you’ve been travelin
You see no reason to continue any more
Still you keep on keepin on
Cause it’s the way you’ve always gone
Won’t you tell me what the hell you do it for
When you see no future
When you see no future
When you see no future
When you see no

Constructive Interference

In chapter eleven of Imagining the Tenth Dimension I talk about three interlocking systems that spring from the tenth dimension as I have portrayed it: those three systems are the physical universe, the spiritual universe of memes and beliefs, and the "constructive interference pattern" between those two systems which we see as life. I propose that life can be thought of as any force or pattern that appears to be interested in "what happens next".

Let's talk about constructive interference. When one wave or pattern interacts with another, there are two kinds of interference. Destructive interference happens when two waves cancel each other out, while constructive interference happens when two waves reinforce each other. We can see both kinds of interference in the ripple tank many of us know from high school physics classes, and constructive interference is what creates the moving shapes we can see in a moiré pattern as one grid moves against another.

Constructive interference is an especially useful phrase in this instance, because we can bend its meaning slightly to imply that life can choose to constructively interfere with the other two systems, or it can just be a moiré pattern that we see as the interaction between the other two systems. What I am proposing is that if there is no interaction between the physical realm and the realm of memes, there is no life. That doesn’t mean that those first two systems cease to exist, but without an observer to collapse their wavefunctions from their indeterminate state, it means that they remain as potential states only… and this indeterminacy applies just as much to world of spimes (objects that can be tracked in spacetime) as it does to world of memes (ideas that can be tracked in spacetime).

One of my favorite concepts which applies to this line of thinking is “that which ceases to change ceases to exist”. Here's some of what I say in the book about that idea:

When the brain processes input from the auditory nerve, it tends to reject any continuous noises which do not change–like, for instance, the noise of the air molecules in the room banging into each other, or the sound of an air conditioner. In other words, for our consciousness, the noises (or smells, or continuous aches and pains, and so on) which cease to change, will cease to exist because the brain stops them from being considered for processing. When we listen back to the tape recording, we are hearing what’s really in the room, without the phase reversed noise cancellation the brain uses to remove those continuous noises. Now, when the internal mechanisms of the ear are damaged, usually through exposure to excessive sound levels, we end up with an imbalance, where the brain is correcting for frequencies that are no longer coming in. This manifests itself as tinnitus, or “ringing of the ears”. It turns out that the ringing we hear is not from the ears, but from the brain itself, as it attempts to cancel out particular frequencies that are no longer coming in from the auditory nerve.

Likewise, a recent article in Scientific American talks about ongoing research that has been done on human visual perception. In the past, this particular experiment was done with a display attached to a person's eyeball with a suction cup - and what the experiment showed is that people become blind when their eye motion didn't change what they were seeing. Nowadays they do the same experiment with computer tracking of eyeball movement, and a computer generated display that moves around in exact sync with the person's eyes. So why, in normal circumstances do we not become blind just from looking in one direction? Because we compensate for this problem by wiggling our eyeballs around slightly to continually change what we are are seeing, with microscopic motion called microsaccades.

If our reality is being created by a series of dots (or "quanta" one planck length apart from each other on the fourth-dimensional line that we perceive of as “time”, then we see a way to imagine that we are already looking at an interference pattern between those slices and the quantum waves of indeterminacy contained with the multiverse and the higher dimensions. But life adds an additional complexity to this image: because the process of being interested in "what happens next" can move at very many different speeds and with many different patterns. In the most extreme parts of our world – volcanic vents in the ocean floor, ice in the Antarctic, scientists are finding life. That life, with a limited eco-system and small amounts of energy to draw from, would be much more slow-moving and simple than, say, your average warm-blooded mammal. But all forms of life share one thing in common – a desire to continue. This is what separates mere chemical reactions from life.

Our eyes and our brains are conditioned to recognize life, and many people who have witnessed the death of a beloved animal or family member will tell you that they knew exactly when the spirit had left the body. It’s interesting to think of death then, as being the moment when the force that was interacting with the physical world to create that life stops interacting, and the life appears to cease to exist. This also gives us a way to understand how profound sickness or disease could cause most of the meme-system that represented a particular personality to leave the body well before the body ceases to be alive.

Why, some might ask, do I feel the need to place life in its own realm - why can't it just be an aspect of physical reality, or an aspect of the spiritual reality? This all relates back to timelessness. Physicists tell us that time is an illusion, and my way of imagining reality agrees with that conclusion. If, within the fabric that our reality is created from, everything has already happened, then this must be true for life as well as it is true for our physical reality. Which leads us to this strange conclusion: if the illusion of time is just one way of viewing the indeterminate data that exists within the underlying structure of our reality, then that must equally be true for the constructive interference pattern that we think of as life. Which means the ancient mystics have had it right all along. To paraphrase Einstein: not just time, but life itself is an illusion... albeit a persistent one.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Living in the Fifth Dimension

We live in the fifth dimension. Kaluza proved it way back in 1919, and Einstein eventually agreed: the field equations proposed by Einstein and Maxwell for gravity and light can be united if they are calculated in the fifth dimension. But what does that mean to us? And why do most of us continue to believe that our universe exists within four rather than five dimensions?

Quantum mechanics tells us that the building blocks that create our reality are wavefunctions being observed in certain states. At the quantum level, these particles can exist simultaneously in multiple states, but by the time we view our physical reality we are only witnessing one state or another. What causes the dividing line between the strange world of quantum physics and our observed physical reality? This has been one of the great mysteries of the past one hundred years.

As Richard Feynman demonstrated, at any moment in time there is always a probability space that shows what the most likely paths are for how a subatomic particle got to its current position, and where it is most likely headed from here.

What happens if we imagine that the probability space of the quantum world exists within the fifth dimension? If we believe that those other possible states for all of the particles in our universe do actually exist, then we can see how the act of observation collapses the indeterminate state of those particles within the fifth dimension into the specific fourth dimensional line that we perceive ourselves to be on. And if we believe, as many physicists have proposed, that time really is an illusion, then we have a way to imagine how the line of time that we are moving on right now is really just a cross-section out of a multiverse of possible quantum states which continue to exist, but which are decoherent and therefore inaccessible to our own physical reality.

But quantum mechanics goes even further than that. In his book “Programming the Universe”, quantum computer scientist Seth Lloyd shows us how reality and information are interchangeable at the quantum level, and that the big bang can be thought of as the very first binary yes/no of the quantum computer that is our universe and the multiverse it is within. So now let’s take that idea and superimpose it on our fifth-dimensional probability space.

Let’s start with the indeterminate sea of quantum information which exists prior to (or more correctly, "outside of") the big bang – all possible states for all possible particles existing simultaneously within timelessness. Even though this fabric contains the potential for every possible universe within it, Seth Lloyd points out that it would take zero bits to describe. Now, let’s imagine the big bang – the longest lowest wavefunction that joins the beginning of our universe to the end of our universe across the probability space within timelessness. What appears to be a multi-dimensional field of vibrations, though, can also be seen as a binary push/pull, with our fifth-dimensional node always being the dividing point between what is currently possible and what is inaccessible from within our specific observed universe. In this way, we can see how the dimensions above the fifth are unavailable to us because they are part of the binary push away from our reality, while the dimensions below are part of the push back towards the beginning, which from our vantage point appears to be the big bang.

Finally, consider this. If we bend the fabric of a particular dimension, it takes on aspects of the dimension above. Bend a one-dimensional line and it takes on a two-dimensional aspect. Bend a two dimensional plane and it takes on a three-dimensional aspect. What happens if we are imagining Einstein's image of gravity causing a bending of fourth-dimensional spacetime? Aren't we imagining that our fourth-dimensional spacetime is taking on a fifth-dimensional aspect through that bending? Since Kaluza, Einstein, and later Kaluza-Klein all agreed on our existence within the fifth dimension, I would propose that is exactly what Einstein was trying to get us to imagine. I would also propose that the fifth dimension is where the probability space of the quantum wavefunction comes from, since it gives us a way to see how multiple simultaneous branches (or quantum wavestates) could be accessible from our fourth dimensional spacetime.

We live in the fifth dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton